I can't say my evening ended particularly well last night; it looks like the logic board in my early 2011 MacBook Pro decided to go tits-up on me.
I was using the system as normal; two browsers, IRC, dual monitors running, iTunes playing, and Excel and Photoshop idling in the background (in fact I wasn't actively using the system at the time it went, just had music playing and IRC was receiving info), when the screens cut black (and the external reported no connection), my external HDDs respun... and... Nothing. Well, not quite nothing, the CPU fan slowly ramped up and kept spinning fast. I've tried restarting, but I don't get the start chime, the system spins, stops, then goes back to slowly spinning up the CPU fan again.

I've tried resetting the PRAM and SMC, but, without the chime, I don't think those key presses can have any effect; they didn't help in any case.
Taking a peek at iFixit, it looks like a replacement logic board will run be ~$1000... And I'm JUST out of my warrantee, I think (yup, it arrived the last week of March last year). Unfortunately, there's no longer an Apple tech in the region that I really trust; be that as it may, I'll have to determine which is the lesser of two evils and see if maybe there might be a warrantee replace, I suppose.

Aaaannnddd... Vented.

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I called Apple Support today, and the guy thought that it sounded likely that I'll get the replacement covered by warranty since I'm so close to the expiration; I have to bring it in to the technician though, so they can check it out. That's good news, at least.

In the meantime, I've got an Acer laptop my wife bought to use... gotta say, it's a fair jump down in performance, going from a quad core i7 2.2GHz system w/ 8Gb RAM to an AMD C-50 with 4Gb RAM. BIG difference. I have installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a second partition, dual booted with Win7 so that I don't have to use Windows (dunno why, but I just can't seem to like Win7). This is the first time I've used this version of Ubuntu, and they've completely reworked the interface... haven't decided if I get on with it or not yet. They've incorporated some quasi-Mac styles, but not really, and made it a bit harder to quickly find some programs, etc... such as Update Manager On the other hand, the Software Centre is a nice touch. Otherwise, it seems generally ok, though my CPU usage seems to be hovering near 50% even under light load.